This invention relates generally to food servers, and more particularly to a food server for use in institutions, such as hospitals, for facilitating service of complete meals, having both hot and cold items, to large numbers of people.
Insulated food service carts are commonly used in hospitals for transporting individual meals prepared in a central kitchen to remote serving locations, such as rooms of patients. A problem with such service carts is that the meals must be prepared and placed in the cart shortly before meal time. This is because they often do not have any means for heating the meals once they are placed in the cart. If the meals are not served quickly after being put into the cart, they will not be satisfactorily hot.
Another type of food service cart has both a refrigerating mechanism and a heating mechanism for refrigerating and heating a common receptacle. Foods placed within the receptacle can be refrigerated for an extended period and then heated just prior to being served. A disadvantage of such type of cart is that all foods placed within the receptacle are heated. Thus, it does not facilitate the service of meals having both hot and cold items. Another disadvantage of such type of cart is that such carts generally have no mechanism for controlling the humidity within the receptacle. If the humidity in the receptacle is too low, the heating tends to excessively dry the foods. If the humidity is too high, moisture from the hot air in the receptacle tends to condense on the cool foods.